Think back to your childhood ideas about seasonality. Do you remember, in grade school, making those hand traced turkeys and leaf rubbings in the autumn? What about the tissue paper snowman of winter, plastic straw and pastel craft paper flowers of spring, or the endless paintings of rainbows and big smiling suns right before summer break? The turning of the seasons imbued my experience of nature with romance and the anticipation of metamorphosis. I coveted the soft dreamy English-style gardens of Victoria Magazine and wanted to live exactly like Tasha Tudoras an old woman. Our mother was an excellent gardener who evoked in her beds the traditions of her native Midwest giving us spring pansies, summer roses, table settings of dry November leaves and evergreen cyprus branches at Christmas.

If you live somewhere that has all four seasons then you are blessed and know the excitement of a spring bulb peeking through snow and the first golden sycamore. Some L.A. growers like Mr. Homegrown have a 3 season method, but for this SoCal inland valley gardener there are only two. They are “Really Warm” and “The Devil’s Ass-Crack”. I find the latter to be increasingly lasting longer, starting earlier and ending later. If you have surmised that by “increasingly” I refer to the process by which is climate is changing and always has been then you are correct, and I will take this opportunity to say goodbye to the possibly 50% of my readers (all 5 of you, if the stats for this mewling kitten of a blog are correct!) who find this opinion offensive and have lost your taste for Inland ValleyGirl. I hardly knew ye, and truly wish you well in your endeavors. For those of you on the fence, check out the National Geographic redux of the Cosmos series with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, specifically the episode titled “The World Set Free”. It’s visually stunning, thought-provoking, and the best explanation out there.

A couple years after we started growing food, it rained for days and a water-logged tree fell on our house. Fun fact, it was one of only 9 years between 1950 and 2011 that saw over 6 inches of rain in the month of March in Woodland Hills…8 of those years were before 1996. It forced us down to “the flats” and away from the slightly cooler nights and wonderfully Provence-like environment of the North-facing foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Our garden was never at home, but living with more heat in general changed our gardening. At this point I was doggedly ripping up, digging out and generally spending a lot of energy trying to follow a traditional spring/summer/fall/winter planting schedule. There were nice radishes if the mornings stayed cool and tender lettuces some “winters”. These last few years the crops have been increasingly mixed, with peppers coming along as potatoes were still coming out of the ground.

Gardening differs from foraging in that we are imposing an order upon nature, but if you are like me and believe in less effort/more reward than why not just work with what your climate is giving you, right now? Even the busiest person can plan for two garden plantings roughly 6 months apart. List all of the foods that you really love to eat, not just the ones you think everyone should plant. Now separate these into two lists, warm and hot season. Traditionally cool season crops will now be on the warm list (think greens, beets, carrots, chard, radishes) as well as some summer veggies that don’t do well above 90 degrees like snap beans. Warm season crops(tomatoes, squash, eggplant, peppers, corn etc.) will go on the hot list. There are varieties of seeds that have been bred specifically for heat. Check out Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds for unusual varieties that can take it! Order the free catalog, it’s beautiful and has interesting stories. Locate the closest weather station to your garden. Ours is the Pierce College Weather Station and they have a website with monthly and historical data. I’ve been pouring over these charts and looking for patterns, trying to anticipate when the next “warm” season will begin this coming fall. Hey, there’s that week in 2011 the tree fell on our house! So, you say, what if my precious peas start to wither in April when we get our first 90-degree days? Or the basil is killed by the one and only frost we got all year? And I say, so what? You spent a few bucks and took a chance. Make a note of it, and next year plant them one month earlier.

I cannot tell you how many of the seedlings we have lovingly planted have died, how many seeds have refused to sprout, how many tomatoes got sun burnt and blistered. That’s farming, folks! Get used to some loss and disappointment. Just keep putting something in the ground…that old packet of forgotten seeds, those cloves of sprouted garlic in your fridge, half-off bolting veggie transplants at Home Depot, the little bundle of roots left over from your “living lettuce”. You will soon acquire an instinctive knack to knowing what to plant when. The air really does have a different smell when the hot season turns, and it’s not what the name “Devil’s Ass-Crack” would imply. In the Valley, it smells just a little bit fresh and reminds me of pumpkin patches on a hot October night and light sweaters. It smells like the first day with a high temperature under 80 (74 degrees on September 13th, 2016 according to the data) and it smells like the promise of change.

It all happened so quickly. About two weeks ago, our one bed of mixed variety summer squash was just starting to produce. Here in the Valley, early June is already high summer. I filled the crisper with firm and amazingly not chewed-on by critters specimens…yellow crookneck, Eight Ball squash, yellow zucchini, and Mexican squash. Then we were cat-sitting for a week and some more went into that fridge. Now it’s cooking night and the haul has become a mound that threatens to consume the counter like The Blob!

If you have the time, money or space to grow only one vegetable this season, summer squash (Cucurbita pepo) is the best return for your investment. You can learn about growing and different varieties here. We spent about $12 on seedlings (yeah, you can grow from seed if you got the time) and $6 on a bag of compost (yeah, you can make your own if you got the space). We watered a couple times a week and just can’t believe how much food these 6 plants are producing.

I have photos of our whole family holding giant zucchinis that our mom grew in the garden of our suburban Arcadia home. They were HUGE! Summer squash is one of those things that fellow gardeners will politely decline to take off your hands. Everyone has too much. You will leave anonymous bags of them on neighbors doorsteps. You will ignore them in the fridge till they rot. After a dozen loaves of zucchini bread, you’ll need to get creative. Recipes abound! My favorite food podcast and website The Splendid Table has some delectable ones here…and there are some scrummy-looking ones at Dishing Up The Dirt. Try pickled raw slices. Just use your favorite pickling recipe and substitute for the cucumbers…ours is Alton Brown’s bread and butter pickles but I add lots of onions and jalapeno slices & cut the sugar in half. Shamefully, the most obvious way to share extra squash didn’t occur to me (even though I’m positive it’s been mentioned by fellow gardeners) until recently. Food banks welcome fresh produce! If you are in Woodland Hills stop in at the West Valley Food Pantry.

Looking into a bed of squash that has been allowed to go wild is mesmerizing. Like a little forest it’s hollow stalks reach in all directions to create a shady canopy, fuzzy and dry. Butterflies flutter (beautiful and magical little fuckers that started out their lives eating my stuff!) and grody squash bugs creep around when you water and try to shelter at the tips of the leaves. Ladybugs. Bees on the flowers that some people think are delicious but I just don’t find them to have enough flavor to justify disposing of a bunch of frying oil. Squash can get really dehydrated and droop. You’ll think they’re done for but deep water them and…3 days later you have a 10 foot long behemoth! Someday I’m gonna bring a cooler, umbrella & a timelapse garden cam and try to see the squash grow.

It never fails. Every year there are new folks at our community garden, we get to know them just a bit and maybe marvel at their huge sweet potatoes or stunning quality wood beds. Only a staunch few stick around more than a year or two. I like to think they are gardening at home, or just taking a hiatus, but so many people think they have a “brown thumb” or that they just don’t have time to grow food. They get frustrated with gophers, squirrels, weeds, and insects. They attempt to make too large a garden when perhaps just a few potted dwarf fruit trees is all that time will allow, for now.

This is not a blog about perfection. We live in a perfectionist culture, sharing and drooling over slick photos and posting only what makes us look successful, happy, and talented. You may fall in love with your young plants in expensive organic compost, surrounded by new bark, bursting with the promise of fresh salad and Instagram likes. But do you love your garden when the season is over? When it’s time to clear the weeds, dispose of scarab larvae and get dusty, hot, and crawled on by ants?

There will be weeds.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge consumer of beautiful food porn. Glossy coffee table books, well produced foodie shows, your Pinterest board of artisan home baked bread, love it all. My family subscribed to Sunset magazine and Country Living, and some of my most treasured memories are of us visiting botanical gardens around Los Angeles and going on upscale home & garden tours. I was raised to treasure beauty and to strive to do things well. Problem is, my nature is not to seek perfection. I can be unapologetically lazy and am, in my middle years, giving less and less shits about what anyone thinks about my accomplishments.

Gardening should be a hobby you stick with for life, like knitting. Knitters don’t just love scarves but hate the knitting part, and lifetime farmers don’t love vegetables but hate the smell of good loam. Imagine a hobby where you can roll out of bed, throw on what you wore the night before, tuck your hair under a hat (and slather on sunscreen, please), get filthy and feel the joy of washing it all off in a long hot shower. A hobby that exposes you to the sun and essential vitamin D, to the wind, to smells, and to the the billions of microbes that are needed for a healthy immune system. A hobby that rewards your patience and dedication to research with food you can cook and share, and a skill that is essential in any post-apocalyptic scenario.

If you are a project starter but not a finisher, stop bragging about your new organic garden and your contribution to global sustainability, spending too much on trendy garden gadgets, and sending friends photos of each precious leaf like it’s a new baby. Just bring them a fat bouquet of home grown garlic (from the pot on your patio, if that’s all you have!) attached to it’s delicious chives. They’ll say, “You grew this? I didn’t know you had a green thumb!” And you do. Because you studied, because you got dirty, because you relaxed and loved your garden in all of it’s states. Then you can all take a selfie with the garlic and post it on Facebook, because you earned it.

What will you find at Inland ValleyGirl and why should you come back? To begin, I am no “girl”. I’m a “ma’am” at forty-something but it’s the web so I can be who I wanna be.

After growing up in the SGV (San Gabriel Valley) in Los Angeles County and plopping down here in the SFV(San Fernando Valley) in 1989, I have been complaining about the endless summers here ever since. You could have called it the ‘burbs back then, but having a grid of 4-6 lane roads all through it, the 7th worst section of freeway in the nation (The 101 between Sepulveda and Laurel Canyon) and hundreds of new condos and apartments going up every year, my specialty could be called “hot inland valley urban gardening” Whether you have a plot or just a pot on a patio, lots of cash to blow or a strict budget you can grow something to eat! I’ll be covering some subjects that naturally flow from growing food, such as home cooking and the sourcing of ingredients to round out your meals.

If you are a hardcore vegan, against glutinous bread baking or beekeeping, or are sensitive to foul language and irreverance, there are better blogs out there for you. But if you are a beginning gardener looking for encouragement, are lacto-ovo vegetarian, cook for 1-2 people, are interested in unusual ingredients from near and far, and want to learn about the history of agriculture in “The Valley”in particular and Southern California in general, you will probably find something interesting at Inland ValleyGirl. I’ll be sharing my favorite garden books & podcasts, blogs, shortcuts, joys and failures, favorite tools and seeds, local and not so local products and imported ingredients from small ethical producers.

No matter your lifestyle, growing some of your own food will change your life and make eating more satisfying! I hope you’ll come back again and see where I’m goin’ with all this.